Digital Futures

LEGO® Serious Play® is a creative methodology employed in workshops from upward of sixty minutes. Uses include problem solving, team building, reflection, wellbeing, confidence building and many more. This article outlines the background, possible use cases and feedback from staff and students.

Ulster students want to improve their digital capabilities, to have recorded learning content in their course and open access to digital provision and resources. They find interactive learning really useful, such as polls and quizzes, and are using a wide range of tools and apps on personal devices to support their learning. Ulster students appear to be more positive about digital learning than the national average.

For the first time the voice of 22,000 UK post compulsory education learners has been captured to find out about their digital experience. This was made possible through the Jisc Student digital experience tracker 2017 project. Ulster University was one of 29 UK higher education institutions that took part in this. This blog post highlights some of the key findings from 337 Ulster students, benchmarked against UK higher education. It also considers some possible opportunities to enhance educational practice based on the results.

In this blog, I want to explore the terms ‘unbundling’ and ‘marketisation’ as they relate to digital technology. Higher Education is in a time of rapid change globally, partly due to marketization and digital technology, but also due to a number of other factors.

All universities have large tiered lecture theatres. They were designed in a time when didactic teaching was the preferred method of teaching and learning in higher education. They serve a purpose of mass education – a ‘one to many’ model where the teacher is the expert and the students are sat in rows absorbing information by writing down everything the teacher says.

As creative media designers in the Office of Digital Learning we are currently looking forward to a fresh round of submissions for the special projects call 2016. This time provides an opportunity to reflect and share some of the work from the previous project call. This post will showcase the Passport To Engineering project and highlight some of the learning challenges and solutions.

In academic year 2015-16, the University completed an OJEU competitive procurement exercise to test the marketplace and secure a service provider for the next five years. Professor Brian Murphy explains more about the procurement process, the selected supplier and how the digital learning environment at Ulster University will bring benefits to teaching, learning and student engagement in the following Insight article available to Ulster staff at https://www.ulster.ac.uk/insight/news/feature-news/2016/06/blackboard/

Brian Murphy is Director of Access, Digital and Distributed Learning at Ulster University where he has established the Centre for Widening Access and Participation, the Centre for Flexible and Continuing Education, and the Office for Digital Learning.